Future requirements for military fighting vehicles, such as tanks, call for an unparalleled combination of fire power and protection integrated into a highly mobile and transportable vehicle of lower weight and reduced signature size. To meet these requirements, all systems must be compact and lightweight and capable of being packaged in a fighting vehicle with minimal consumption of space.
One system that has been particularly challenged to meet stringent space requirements is the armament system, particularly the ammunition handling aspects of the armament system. Ammunition rounds for the tank howitzer must be stored in a safe and secure manner to withstand travel over rough terrain. Typically, the howitzer rounds are stored in one or more magazines located in the tank hull and/or turret bustle. The magazines must be designed to optimize storage density, thereby maximizing storage capacity consistent with available space that is not abundant. In the past, the task of retrieving rounds from the magazine(s) and loading them into the tank howitzer was performed manually. Thus, considerable space within the tank hull and turret had to be allotted to accommodate body movements of a tank crew member necessary to retrieve and load the howitzer rounds. Also, such manual handling of howitzer rounds is not conducive to rapid fire action of the cannon in battle and jeopardizes the safety of the ammunition handling crew member.
To save at least some of the space required for the manual handling of howitzer ammunition, automated ammunition loading systems have been proposed and developed. Such autoloading systems successively retrieve howitzer rounds from a magazine(s) and load them into the tank howitzer without intervention by a tank crew member. This autoloading approach to serving the tank howitzer achieves a rapid firing rate and enhances crew safety.
One of the crucial aspects of an autoloading system is the interface between the ammunition magazine and the autoloader. Typically, the large caliber ammunition rounds successively downloaded from the magazine are not in the proper orientation for handoff to the loading arm of an autoloader. Consequently, a "tip tray" is utilized to reorient each ammunition round as received from the magazine downloading port to an orientation acceptable to the loading arm. In the past, reorientation in either azimuth or elevation was all that was required. However, in future military tank designs, the space available for ammunition round reorientation will be severely limited. Consequently, the reorienting motion will be required to follow a complex path that avoids all static and dynamic structures within the close confines of the tank.